She's back, as June '14 Kewpie of the Month!Ann was Kewpie of the Month back in '06, now
she has written a book.... you know "me" about reading books, but I hope you
will read it and let me know, let Ann know and let
amazon.com how you liked it!Thanks, Ann! -
from Charley

Email from Ann......Hi Charley,

I think Westbow Press has gotten everything
cleaned up now on the Internet with information concerning my
memoir, Laughter on My Path: An Educator’s Funny and Compelling
Encounters with People, Problems, and Pets. It can now be ordered
though Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million and 25,000
booksellers worldwide, including most local booksellers. The most
helpful information is on Amazon.com, using this link:

Chapters 3 and 23 have the most
Hickman things in them, although some other chapters are about
Columbia, including stories about Dr. Neil Aslin, who became my
advisor when I started back into graduate school to study to be an
educational administrator.I hope you’ll have a chance to read the
silly thing soon, as I’ve had a great deal of fun at my own expense,
as well as that of others. Also, if anyone who reads it would like
to submit a review to Amazon, whether it be good, bad, or
indifferent, it would help people get a sense of what’s in the book.
In addition, if anyone wants to examine my sordid past, I can be
found on the Internet by typing in: Ann Lowrance Allman Linkedin

Thanks so much for all your help and for all your generous help
for us Kewpies!

And for keeping Russ for a whole week!

Hugs, Ann

"Kewpie
of the Month" for March/April 2006
Ann
Lowrance - Class of 1956

Father
showed me my first cadaver when I was seven. I didn’t expect any less from
a medical school professor father who spoke medicalese to small children.
You’d think with all that I would have had a head start on becoming a nurse,
but I didn’t do guts, blood or pus.

I did love music, and started singing in the third grade. By sixth grade,
I was playing the clarinet, and in ninth grade I started the oboe and began
my almost five years with Stephens’ Burrall Symphony Orchestra. Added to
performances at school, it was definitely overkill.

But I fooled everyone including myself, and never became a full time musician.
I’d seen too many married bassoon players asking single flutists for dates
and I didn’t want the lifestyle. But I did keep on singing. I gave my oboe
back to Stephens College
and thought about religious education or home economics. Obnoxiously undecided,
I finally settled on Spanish at MU because I had more hours in it on my
Christian
College transcript. I asked Johnny Crane what I should do with
it since I had sworn off teaching, and he suggested being a translator
in an import-export house. I didn’t even know where one was. By then I
was married to Jack Hamilton and lived too far away anyway. So after my
B.A. at MU, I became a part
time waitress for a few months. Friends said it at least kept me from roaming
the streets and annoying people.

Then I became a florist at Mueller’s while Jack was serving his six months
in the Army. A Neosho teacher spied me decorating a wedding table and said
they needed a Spanish teacher at his high school. Mumbling to myself, I
hastily took some education classes so I could get the job, and started
off on the long education career I had just sworn off of.

Not much later, I was shucking out babies like peas, helping Jack run our
newly bought greenhouse and flower shop in Joplin, and eyeing the chance
to get back into education. Four years later, my request to be a substitute
teacher in Joplin turned into a Dean of Girls job at the high school. They
were desperate. They would have hired anyone who smelled good and had on
a nice dress. I was an idiot with no training for it, but it was the perfect
fit. I counseled misbehaving girls, monitored the daily attendance for
over 1,000 of them, and chased graffiti monsters and fire dragons out of
the restrooms.

After
that, I knew I was destined to become a counselor/administrator combination,
an unheard of concept due to the difference in training. I started graduate
work in secondary school administration at MU, and after getting my Master’s,
became Assistant to the Dean of Students at my alma mater, now Columbia
College. I taught education classes, dealt with men sneaking into
women’s dorms, went on drug raids and supervised the work-aid program.

I went from there to Assistant Principal at Neosho
High School where I got out my tracing paper and copied all the
graffiti from the bathroom walls and sent it around to the English teachers
for identification. I also accidentally locked the band teacher in the
boys’ bathroom. Don’t ask. On the side, I went back to school for about
the sixth time and finished all but my dissertation, heading for a doctorate
in educational administration. Then I started taking counseling courses.

In 1976, Jack and I were divorced and later I married Jack Allman, Superintendent
of Schools in Joplin.
Three months later, my ex-husband married my sister Janet. Our three boys
contemplated calling him “Uncle Dad.” I didn’t know what to call my new
brother-in-law, nor my sister, who was also my children’s aunt as well
as their stepmother. So we all just stayed friends.
Finally Jack and I left his three college age boys behind and loaded up
my three, our two dogs, and all our possessions and moved to Buenos
Aires, Argentina to take over jobs in the American Community School
as Superintendent and Director of Guidance. Then I found out that Argentine
Spanish wasn’t the same as mine. When I asked for three pineapples, they
told me I was asking for three punches in the nose. My secretary asked
me to please not use the word “mujer” (woman) when speaking about patrons,
because a “mujer” was a prostitute. When I gave a speech in Spanish to
the elementary school faculty, thinking I was telling them what a good
man my husband was, I found out later that I was lauding his virility.
Back in the States, I taught Spanish in high school for six more years
– in Ava, MO and in McDonald County. When they threatened to make me teach
German by satellite without knowing a word of it, I and my new counselor
certification escaped to Missouri Southern
State College (now University) in Joplin. I stayed for fifteen
wonderful years as counselor and career / academic advisor for people who
didn’t give a rip about mujeres, pineapples, or how virile my husband
was. Some just wanted me to teach them something during my nighttime Scared-Spitless-Older-Adults
Orientation and Career Classes, so they wouldn’t feel so dumb in regular
classes later.

While there, thanks to encouragement and support from my husband who got
his Ed.D. at age 49, I finally wrote my dissertation. I received the same
Ed.D. in 1994, at age 56, twenty-two years after I started it. Don’t ask
about that either. My grandchildren were in the audience yelling, “Yeah,
Grandma!” as I walked across the stage. I was thankful my MU advisor knew
better than some of his colleagues, who put hoods on upside down with the
pointy end running up their advisees’ noses.

Jack retired in 1990 from his final job as Superintendent in McDonald
County, and I retired from MSSC in 2003, as an associate professor,
when I could finally get Medicare. I’m currently writing my memoirs, better
named, misadventures, and naming names. I’ve already had to change half
of them. The only ones I don’t have to worry about are my older relatives
who are all dead and can’t squawk about what I say about them. At least
no one has reported seeing any of their names on bathroom walls.